"The night we felt the earth would move
We stole and plucked him by the hand,
Because we loved him with the love
That knows but cannot understand.

"And when the roaring hillside broke,
And all our world fell down in rain,
We saved him, we the Little Folk;
But lo! he does not come again!

"Mourn now, we saved him for the sake
Of such poor love as wild ones may.
Mourn ye! Our brother will not wake,
And his own kind drive us away!"
--_Dirge of the Langurs._

The poem is excellent cold craft, but leaves us precisely in the state
of mind in which it found us. The story which follows it is rooted in
the same idea; but, where the one is a literary exercise, the other is
a supreme feat of imagination.

Here, with _The Miracle of Purun Bhagat_, the story itself and not the
dirge of the Langurs, we may conveniently leave the reputation of our
author. Critics of a future generation may need to apologise for
including within the limits of a brief monograph a specific chapter
upon Mr Kipling's verse. They will not need to apologise for its
brevity.